For my last post I did Wine-Glazed Cornish Hens, and after I completed the full recipe I experimented with an alteration of the recipe with a single hen. It did not go well, producing very dry meat that I was not looking forward to eating. So that was shoved in the fridge until I figured out something to do with it.
I believe a big part of being a real-life, grownup cook is learning how to prepare food with what you have. I’m trying to get out of the habit of throwing things out if they didn’t go as planned, and planning meals around what I already have in the fridge rather than buying a slew of very specific ingredients that I probably won’t use again. Casseroles and various salads (chicken salad, egg salad) are good tools for this. The problem is actually creating something that tastes good. You have to learn to improvise, which requires practice, and may result in destroying more food than you set out to salvage.
Doing something with the dry dry chicken turned out to be easier than I thought. There’s a chicken salad recipe I got off of Allrecipes.com that I love and is always a hit. It appears to have been removed, but this recipe is nearly identical. Just use lemon juice instead of lime and fresh minced onion rather than onion powder. Luckily I had almost all the ingredients it calls for, so I didn’t need to improvise as much as I thought I would.
The recipe calls for bacon, grapes, and water chestnuts, none of which I had. Bacon is delicious but unnecessary, so I didn’t bother to find a substitute. Instead of grapes, I chopped up part of a sweet apple that had been sitting around too long. For the water chestnuts, I picked a handful of pecans out of my Extra Fancy Unsalted Mixed Nuts from CostCo (that purchase has been much more useful than I could have ever anticipated), broke them up a bit, and threw them in. I was shocked that the partial head of celery that’s been wilting in the vegetable drawer for the past few weeks (it’s been too cold to venture out to the compost barrel) actually had one semi-crisp stalk on it. I didn’t really measure any of the ingredients because I had an odd amount of chicken and didn’t want to do math. Also I was doing this just before bed so I could have something for lunch the next day, so I was feeling a bit lazy. It ended up tasting not quite right. I may have messed up the proportions, or maybe the chicken sat in the fridge in a carelessly covered casserole dish for a little too long. Or maybe it really did need the bacon. So I added a few dashes of tarragon vinegar, and it was perfect. Vinegar fixes a lot of stuff.
The chicken salad was beautiful, but I didn’t get a chance to photograph it before we ate it all. Maybe next time. It’s no big deal because it’s not going in the recipe book, but I do like pictures of pretty things. Que sera sera.
The Humble Pie 